Behind Closed Doors

By now, you probably know that I write about my life. Not because I think my life is particularly extraordinary, but because I’ve come to believe that the most therapeutic thing I can offer isn’t a clinical framework or a list of coping strategies. It’s honesty. Real, unfiltered, sometimes uncomfortable honesty. And I do it sometimes to a fault. This week I almost didn’t. I sat down and stared at a blank screen for a long time because what’s been living inside me lately is something I’m not sure I have the words to express yet. Something I’m still inside of. And yet here I am because staying silent about the hard things is exactly what this column has always pushed back against.

This week was hard. Really hard. Not in a “bad hair day” stressful week kind of hard. Hard in a way that makes you question things. Hard in a way that sits in your chest and doesn’t move. Something happened in my personal life, something that lives behind closed doors that I’m not ready to open up about yet. Perhaps never. But it happened and it shook me. And I think that pretending otherwise would be a disservice to all of you who read this column and think that I have everything figured out.

I don’t. I really don’t.

And here’s the thing. Neither does anyone else.

Over the past few weeks, something kept happening that I couldn’t ignore. People reached out to me. Some I know well, some I barely know at all. And they opened up. About their marriages. About their health concerns. About the anxiety that wakes them up at 3 a.m. and won’t let go. About the loneliness they carry into rooms full of people who love them. About the gap between the life they’re living and the life they thought they would have by now, the life they planned for, the life they were certain was coming to them.

One night I turned to my husband and said quietly, almost to myself: “People are really suffering.” Not as a dramatic statement, just as a truth I couldn’t shake. Because it is true. People are really suffering. Every day. Behind closed doors, behind curated feeds, behind the smile they’ve perfected for public consumption. And most of the time, you would never know.

A while back I wrote a piece about suffering in silence, how isolating it feels to carry our hardest things alone, and how everyone else seems to be swimming effortlessly while we feel like we’re drowning. I meant every word of what I said when I wrote it. I still do. But there’s something profoundly different about writing something and actually living it. About knowing the theory and then having the theory walk up and sit down across from you and look you in the eye.

Here I am, living it.

What I’ve noticed from the inside of a hard thing is how well we all perform. How extraordinarily well. We get up and get dressed and show up and say, “Baruch Hashem, everything’s great” before someone has even finished asking. We post the beautiful Shabbos table. We make the simcha look seamless. We sit in shul and daven and smile at the people around us and nobody would ever guess. We’ve gotten so good at looking fine that I think we’ve forgotten we don’t always have to be.

I want to say something and I want to say it directly: cut the performance. I say this with love, and I say it to myself as much as to anyone else. Not every hard thing needs to be shared publicly. Clearly, I’m living proof of that right now. There is such a thing as sacred privacy, and some things belong only to you and to the people closest to you. I understand that. I respect that.

But there is a significant difference between choosing privacy and hiding behind a facade. Between protecting something tender and constructing a version of yourself so polished and airtight that the people who love you the most have no idea you’re barely holding it together. One is an act of wisdom. The other is an act of fear. And I think most of us, most of the time, are operating out of fear.

Fear of judgment. Fear of being seen as weak or broken or like we don’t have it all together. Fear that if people saw the full, unedited, unfiltered picture, all the hard, complicated, messy parts, that they wouldn’t love us the same way. So, we edit. We manage. We control the narrative so tightly that we start to believe our own highlight reel, and we forget that everyone else is doing the same thing.

Here’s the painful irony: we are all performing for each other. All of us. At the same time. We are all in the audience of someone else’s performance while putting on our own, and nobody is stopping to say, “Wait, can we just be real for a second?”

So let me be real.

What I do know is that I am someone who plans. I think ahead, I prepare, I like to understand things and make sense of them before I move forward. I like to know where I’m going. So, sitting with uncertainty, real uncertainty, the kind that doesn’t resolve itself by morning, is not something that comes naturally to me. It’s something I’m having to learn in real time whether I want to or not.

But we have so much less control than we think. So much less. We write these careful outlines for our lives, we plan the chapters, we decide how things are supposed to go, and then life completely ignores everything we’ve written and does something else entirely. Something we didn’t choose. Something we wouldn’t have chosen.

I’ve been sitting with that this week. With the helplessness of it. With the terrifying and yet strangely freeing recognition that I am not the one holding the pen. That there is a plan that is bigger than mine, written by Someone who sees further than I do, and my job (as hard as it is) is to surrender to it.

I’ve written about this before, about the need to let go of control, about faith over fear. And I believe it. I genuinely believe it. But believing something in theory and actually unclenching your hands and letting go are two completely different things. And I’m in the messy process of actually trying to do it.

What I know and what I try to hold onto is that not every ending is an ending. Sometimes, what looks like a door closing is actually a wall coming down and the chapter you were gripping so tightly needed to end so something you couldn’t imagine could begin. Something better. Something truer. Something that actually fits the person you are now rather than the person you used to be.

I’m not there yet. I want to be honest about that. I’m still in the middle of it, still finding my footing, still having moments when I don’t feel the faith, just the fear. But I’m here. I’m writing this down. And to me, that means something.

And if you’re in the middle of something too, something you haven’t told anyone, something you’re carrying quietly into every room you walk into, I want you to know that you’re not alone. Not even close. The person next to you in shul, the one at school pickup, the one whose life looks completely assembled, they’re probably carrying something too.

Behind closed doors, we’re all doing the best job we can.

And sometimes, just knowing that is enough to keep us going. 

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686.